90 Your Well-Being: The Secular Experts Speak

Summary:  Join us as we review how philosophers and modern secular psychologists understand mental health and well-being.  In this episode, we look at the attempts to define what make us happy, from the 4th century BC to the present day.  Arristipus, Aristotle, Descartes, Freud, Seligman, Porges, Schwartz, and two diagnostic systems.  We take a special look at how positive psychology and Internal Family Systems see well-being.  Lead in In  June of 1991 I was really traumatized Just left a spiritually and psychologically abusive group and I was struggling How could this have happened I thought I was giving my life to God -- and then I find out the community I was in was like this -- Had to confront my own behaviors in the community -- manipulation, deception, betrayals of trust -- things like that.  I knew I had to recover.  And so I went on a quest I was still Catholic, I never lost my faith, but I felt really burned by the Catholic Church I wanted to learn everything I could about social influence, about group dynamics, about psychological manipulation -- in part so what happened before would never happen again, and also to tap into wisdom that I didn't have access to in my very sheltered community. In short, I was on a quest to find out the best of what secular psychology had to offer.  I would have gone to a Catholic Graduate What I was looking for What I found Introduction Question may arise, "Why Dr. Peter, since you are a Catholic psychologist, why are you even looking at these secular sources? Why even bother with them?  Don't we have everything we need in Scripture, in the traditions of the Church, in the writings of the Church Fathers and the saints, and in magisterial teaching?  I thought this was a Catholic podcast here.  Let me ask you question in return then -- Let's say you're experiencing serious physical symptoms -- something is wrong medically.  You have intense abdominal pain, right around your navel, your belly is starting to swell, you have a low-grade fever, you've lost your appetite and you're nauseous and you have diarrhea.  How would you react if I were to say to you: "Why are you considering consulting secular medical experts?  What need have you of doctors and a hospital?  Don't you have everything you need in Scripture, in the traditions of the Church, in the writings of the Church Fathers and the saints, and in magisterial teaching?  If I responded to you like that, you might think I'm a crackpot or that I believe in faith healing alone or that I just don't get what you are experiencing.Those are the symptoms of an appendicitis, and that infected appendix could burst 48-72 hours after your first symptoms.  If that happens, bacteria spread infection throughout your abdomen, and that is potentially life-threatening.  You would need surgery to remove the appendix and clean out your abdomen.  Remember that we are embodied beings -- we are composites of a soul and a body. The 17th Century Philosopher Rene Descartes' gave us a lot of great things, including analytic geometry,  but he was wrong splitting the body from the mind in his dualism.   Descartes' mind-body dualism, the idea that the body and the mind operate in separate spheres, and neither can be assimilated into the other which has been so influential in our modern era. In the last several years we are realizing just how much of our mental life and our psychological well-being is linked in various ways to our neurobiology -- the ways that our nervous systems function.  And the relationship between our embodied brain and our minds is reciprocal -- each affects the other in complex ways that we are just beginning to understand.  In other words, brain chemistry affects our emotional states.  And our emotional states and our behaviors affect brain chemistry.  It's not just our minds and it's not just our bodies and it's not just our souls -- it's all of those, all of what makes me who I am, body, mind, soul, spirit, all of it.  And since Scripture, the Early Church Fathers, the Catechism and so on are silent on neurobiology, neurochemistry, neurophysiology and so many other areas that impact our minds and our well-being, as a Catholic psychologist I am going to look elsewhere, I'm going to look into secular sources.  I just don't think it's reasonable to expect the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops or the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican to be experts in these areas -- it's not their calling.  I just don't think anyone is going to find an effective treatment for bulimia by consulting the writings of the Early Church Fathers or in St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica.  That is unreasonable .  And it's just as unreasonable, in my opinion, to ignore the body and just try to work with the mind.  I also believe that God works through non-Catholics in many ways -- many non-Catholic researchers and clinicians and theorists are using the light of natural reason to discover important realities that help us understanding well-being, and they are inspired to seek what can be known with good motivations, with good hearts and sharp minds to help and love others.   I am a Catholic with upper-case C, a big C and I am catholic with a lower-case C -- a little C.  Catholic with a little C.  According to my Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus, Third Edition, which I rely on for wordfinding, according to this thesaurus, the synonyms for Catholic with a small c include the following terms:  universal, diverse, broad-based, eclectic, comprehensive, all-encompassing, all-embracing and all-inclusive.  That's what catholic with a small c means.  So I am Catholic with a big C and catholic with a small c.  And a final point about why I look to secular sources -- The Church herself encourages us to look to all branches of knowledge and glean what is best from them.  From the CCC, paragraph 159  "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth." "Consequently, methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are."And from the Vatican II document, the Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World, paragraph 62 reads:  In pastoral care, sufficient use must be made not only of theological principles, but also of the findings of the secular sciences, especially of psychology and sociology, so that the faithful may be brought to a more adequate and mature life of faith.Finally, I will say that considering the whole person -- Soul, spirit, mind and body -- all of the person is so much more helpful in the proc...